


Walking In Circles, Doubting The Ground

by Experimental



Series: Forbidden Colors [5]
Category: Yami No Matsuei
Genre: Backstory, Betrayal, F/M, Friendship/Love, Guilt, POV Multiple
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-15
Updated: 2012-09-09
Packaged: 2017-11-05 11:55:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/406116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Experimental/pseuds/Experimental
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Immortality is a much misunderstood thing to those who covet it. I know better now than I ever did in life: Death, and what comes after, is never as simple as religion would have it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fifth and final part of Forbidden Colors consists of viewpoints alternating between Oriya and Tatsumi. It also contains backstory based largely on this author's own speculation, which for these characters is a little like reconstructing a whole dinosaur from a jawbone. Some humoring humbly requested.

I'll go walking in circles    
While doubting the very ground beneath me   
Trying to show unquestioning faith in everything   
Here am I, a lifetime away from you   
The blood of Christ, or a change of heart

* * *

The roses were what captured his attention. Though a far cry from that cherry tree that bloomed evermore in his courtyard, leaves never turning and dying, he knew instantly that they were kin. Or rather, he recognized the hand that had gone into them. 

Oh, perhaps his old friend didn't have such a direct hand in their creation—Oriya had never known him to be a horticulturalist of any degree—but he was behind them nonetheless. And their seemingly immortal bloom. Immortality, after all, had been his obsession.

As sure as mortality had been his trade.

“You take milk and sugar in your coffee?”

“Just black these days, I'm afraid.”

“That's right. I forgot.”

He detected a tone of sullenness in those words that was completely unjustified. If his memory served him correct, she hadn't been so different once upon a time. A studious girl who liked her afternoon tea cloudy with milk, and her late-night coffee as naked as the day it was born. Quite the opposite of himself. 

Until recently.

The arrangement in the center of the table spoke of the new year: Deep, garnet red next to blinding white. Grandifloras as wide as his outstretched palm. Petals so velvet-soft he didn't have to touch them to feel their fur. A perfume floated off the blooms and lazed in the air like incense smoke, the barest movement causing it to stir and warm the nostrils all over again. Fresh as newly-washed linens, and dark as spiced wine. He did not see the slightest trace of mildew, blackspot, or even the darkening, wrinkling of age that so often creeps along the outer petals even as the inner are still unfolding.

_And such as these, in the dead middle of winter. . . ._

“They're his. If that's what you're wondering.”

She set the coffee down in front of him, the fine porcelain cup and saucer rattling cleanly against one another as they settled on the table. Keeping her own in hand, she settled herself down at the opposite end of the table. 

Her legs folded under her as easily as a spider's. How frail she had become since they had last spoken in person. From illness, or simply working herself too hard? Long nights in the lab, hours on the phone, fighting as always against the ceaseless, careless march of time?

“I had others, more traditional varieties, but they've all died on me over the years, no matter what I tried. Somehow these ones only get stronger. I couldn't kill them if I wanted to. I guess that's the way it usually works, isn't it?”

Or perhaps they were responsible for her other plants' deaths, Oriya wanted to say. Toxic, to the core, like the one in whose memory they had been crafted. But he saw no need to voice what she no doubt suspected herself.

* * *

“I don't believe he's dead, Oriya.”

He looked up at her, his gaze cutting sharp through the delicate gauze of steam rising from her cup. “It's been too long. You said yourself, he would have found a way to get word to us if he could—”

“And when was the last time _you_ heard from him? More than a cryptic apology or an unsigned package, that is.”

He would not answer her that. He could not, without revealing too much.

He raised his cup. The coffee was a black hole inside the bone-white lip. He had to say, he much preferred tea. “Absence of evidence is not evidence. I should think I need not remind you of that.”

“Ah, the old Russell's teapot defense.” She smiled to herself, a joke he was not privy to. “You've been in the old capital too long, Oriya. You're starting to sound like a poet.”

“And you're sounding more and more like him.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Her frosty silence told him as much if nothing else did. Even that echoed shades of Muraki Kazutaka. 

Sakuraiji Ukyo, their old school friend, and his old friend's fiancée. Once upon a time. It seemed she had followed their mutual friend in all things: medical school, genetic manipulation, a taste for roses and weak, black coffee. . . . 

And now even the way she smiled to herself as though to say she could not possibly expect Oriya to understand. He recognized in her Muraki's relentless drive to _know_ , to not rest until he had solved whatever problem was plaguing him. Except where Muraki had always been pessimistic about the fragility of human life, she had managed to hold stubbornly to her faith in its tenacity. Even the clouds that crossed her youthful features now would not stay long.

But this new frailness. . . . 

That was what worried Oriya, if anything did. You've followed in his footsteps your entire adult life, he wanted to tell her. Do not follow him in this.

If he knew his old friend at all, he knew the last thing Muraki would have wanted was for whatever darkness that had haunted his life to taint _her_ with its malignancy. Muraki had good reason to keep his distance, if he still lived. Just take his silence as I have, Oriya wanted to but dared not say: his last act of kindness toward the two of us.

The roses watched Oriya as he sipped his coffee. The roses she had bred especially for him—for her Kazutaka. The color to his specifications, the longevity to his desire. She had perfected immortality where their old friend had failed.

But to what gain?

* * *

When I was a child, a friend of my father's gave him a cricket in a cage.

It was all the rage in those days to have one in one's home: as a bringer of good fortune, and a living song that could be enjoyed at any time of day.

But Father was a busy man, so he gave it to me to care for. He knew I enjoyed an intellectual challenge—I was always hovering around the top of my class—and he thought a pet would make a fine compliment to my studies. 

So I eagerly hoarded any and all books I could find on the care and feeding of crickets. I gave it scraps from the kitchen. I monitored its movements, the amount of sunlight it was exposed to, the varieties of sounds it made. . . .

But in the end, it died all the same. Without ever having left that cage.

* * *

Immortality is a much misunderstood thing. To those who covet it, it is the answer to every question—an escape from the uncertainty and pain of death. It is comfort to the man whose life's work isn't done—to the woman who mourns a husband whose corpse she never sees, and prays for her children's sake that there is something better than this life somewhere on the other side of the veil, somewhere they will never have to experience loss or struggle or fear.

But to those of us who possess it—

I don't believe there is a single one of us who would not trade it for the blissful nothingness of the final grave. It is only our sense of responsibility that keeps us going, reminds us that there are too many who would lose by our own selfish gain. It is for the sake of others that we persist. Some of those others we hardly know, or know not at all; but we feel called to duty nonetheless, by our shared humanity if nothing else. 

As for the rest, the blessedly few—

We would gladly put aside our own troubles to take from them their burdens, carry that heavy load on our own shoulders, not out of altruism, but out of something even less rational, even more at odds with our most fundamental, survivalist nature:

Love.

I was a timid inductee in the world of the shinigami when I met Tsuzuki. Having just had the scales peeled from my eyes by my own death, awakening to realize everything I thought I knew about the universe around me was flawed and incomplete, I was desperate for direction, and cleaved to the first person to show it to me.

Though we were paired together by our division chief with no personal say in the matter, Tsuzuki took me under his wing as though being saddled with me had been the answer to his prayers. Though he was only a few years younger than I had been when he died, his decade and a half of experience over me made him an obvious choice of mentor. 

Yet there was a childlike ease to his character as well, that had been taken from me at an early age. If I ever had it to begin with. Perhaps the incongruous magnitude of his enthusiasm should have been a sign to me that there was turmoil lurking just beneath his calm surface, but that is an observation which can only come with hindsight. At the time, there was nothing to suggest to me that our working relationship would be anything but fruitful for many years to come, and that I might find in him the kind of peer and friend I had never truly known in my brief life of twenty-nine years.

Tsuzuki was my first and only official partner in this place. In the Land of the Dead, it seems we may not age and wither, but after three months with him, our partnership was deader, as the saying goes, than a doornail.

When the storm was over and the dust had settled, they made me secretary to the chief of the Summons Division, and there I've been ever since, preparing budgets for approval, awarding allowances, making travel arrangements for my peers on assignment. And fielding whatever complaints about their behavior Summons might receive from other departments. I would say it was a living, if I were. Living, that is.

But the difference is a mere matter of semantics. Alive or dead, my existence follows the same cycle it always has: Work. Sleep. Rise before the sun. Parcel out blame as if it were mail to be sorted into the appropriate cubbyholes. 

Persist, somehow, in the shadows.

In this cage equal parts fate and my own making.

* * *

My father married above his station. That was the beginning of my troubles.

He came from a line of unremarkable Tatsumis, but had managed to elevate himself above their mediocrity and make a name for himself as a small-businessman. In his later years, he was rather fond of drink and gambling; but when he met my mother, he was a promising entrepreneur. No doubt part of what motivated him to this early success was a desire to win over my mother's parents, who—as she was always quick to remind us in her darkest boughts of despair—were descended from samurai nobility.

I'm not privy to exactly what motives each party had in sealing the arrangement, though I suspect some eagerness on my grandparents' part to marry Mother off. She had older siblings, and in those days it would have been unseemly for her to marry before the eldest daughter. I cannot be sure, having never known Mother's side of the family except by hearsay, if there were hints even then of the drastic mood swings which would later incapacitate her for days at a time, or if those were merely a product of a tattered marriage to a man more than a decade her senior and a household of hungry children to look after. I do wonder if, to Mother's family, despite his low birth, Father's interest was welcomed as precisely the opportunity they were waiting for. Or if there were more expedient circumstances demanding their marriage be made official—some more natural reason for the distance they kept forever after between themselves and their youngest daughter. Mother was still not yet eighteen, after all, when I was born.

Which was not to say my parents were not wholly in love. I have every reason to believe that in the early years of their marriage, and certainly during their courtship, they fully believed they were.

But by the time my youngest sister entered the world, reality had made itself quite at home in our small suburban household. Whether it was Father's string of failed ventures that led to Mother's ultimate state of despair, or her temper that contributed to Father's unhealthy financial practices, I cannot say, but they fed one another's misery until that carriage barreling toward disaster had enough momentum to carry itself.

* * *

We did not want for much in the early years. I do remember that. We lived simply, but we had nice things. There were always fresh flowers and porcelain figurines in the alcove, and we never starved. We even had a cat, a bobtailed rascal with a black mustache that made him look like Natsume Soseki.

That was when Father's business was doing well. That was before Manchuria. And a string of poor decisions that only succeeded in revealing how fragile our semblance of peace truly was.

No. That is not entirely fair. Our hard times started even before the Mukden Incident. Business was booming under the nationalistic optimism that had swept in with the Showa emperor—for everyone, it seemed, but our little household. At that same time, Father moved us to the the bustling urban heart of Tokyo in the hopes his luck in business would improve, but no number of pet crickets would have been enough to lift him out of his bad habits. Nothing would have, short of changing the man he was. 

I shan't say that Mother never tried. With screamed empty threats of flight or infidelity and broken dishes. With ruined suppers and long depressive spells punctuated by bouts of drinking and the occasional violent outburst that prompted me to shuttle my sisters out of the room with covered ears, and Father to shuttle himself from the house for the nearest mah-jongg club.

It was our parents' war. My sisters and I did not start it, but we had no choice but to be caught in the middle of it. Whatever room our parents found themselves both in at the same time became a battlefield, though the righteous cause of the day may vary. 

_What man in his right mind is ever going to make Sachie his wife with a miserable failure like you as a father-in-law?_

Or, _if you want Chiemi to show up for school in old rags like a common tramp, on your head be it!_

Or—that beloved classic— _maybe your son wouldn't need glasses just to see his hand in front of his face if we could afford a proper electric light to study by!_

It always came down to an explosive combination of money and pride. Any simple observation could bring on a volley of abuse and accusation. The slightest provocation could turn dinner into an exercise in guilt-heaping. Mother kept ready just for such occasions a mental list of every luxury she had left behind so she could be in her living hell. “If you truly loved me” began every treaty du jour that our father rushed off without ever signing.

And when the dust settled in the wake of their momentary ceasefire, it was I who stepped up to retake control of the household. Right the overturned tables, clear away the broken vase of flowers before anyone could cut him- or herself on the jagged edges. Fix Mother another drink to calm her nerves, and make sure dinner was on the stove. 

It was not so much that I _wanted_ to be the one to shoulder her burden, only . . . 

Who else would? My two younger sisters? They at least deserved some semblance of the childhood I'd barely had. And I always did feel a certain level of responsibility for the anguish my mother had already suffered. I watched it slowly drive her into an early middle age. If I could not cure the source of her ailment, I could at very least salve her wounds. And I was her son, after all, and eldest child. It was, if nothing else, my sacred duty. 

As soon as I was able, I set myself to managing the household finances. It was a woman's job, but between Father's robbing of Mother's allowance to pay off his bar tabs and gambling debts, and my sisters soon spending their spare time after school in the factories just to put food on the table, I was the natural choice for the role of family accountant. 

I must admit, I took to it rather naturally. I enjoyed mathematics; its concrete rules and predictable outcomes were a queer sort of comfort to me. The economy of daily existence was a much easier thing to endure when it could be broken down into units and formulas that did not fluctuate with moods. 

Something that could not, on the other hand, be said for human dynamics. The less time I spent trying to work out Father's motivations or solve the problem of Mother's melancholia, the saner I, and vicariously the household, remained, for it meant less time dwelling on the unpleasant reality of our circumstances. Each night of beef stew and quiet, contented stomachs became a victory. The fewer of the fine kimono left to her by her family that Mother had to sell to feed my sisters and me, and the fewer nights we children had to work through without sleep to make the debt-collectors go away happy, the more peaceful our world remained for it for another day. 

I liked to believe Father was, in his own way, proud of me. At least I know my hard work did not go unnoticed. 

He never told me as much to my face, but his actions spoke volumes where he could not. When he recommended me to my first employer, I was forced grudgingly to accept what I could never hope to see in writing: that I had done well by him, if only well enough to even out the damage he had caused.

I will not pretend that I was immediately grateful. Whatever few and far-between acts of kindness my father showed his family, his behavior the remainder of the time ensured the scales were forever tipped against his favor.

* * *

The Kokakurou stood on the bank of the Shirakawa like a relic from another time. 

While the rest of the country allowed itself to be swept along in the parade of time and progress, exchanging wooden frames and papered doors for steel and glass, the Kokakurou and its neighbors in the old parts of the old capital stubbornly refused to budge. Not that they could be easily moved; history weighed so greatly down upon them. They stood out in an era of functional monotony, seduced the eye and coaxed out from deep within an upswell of nostalgia for a more elegant time, like spring sunlight calling forth blossoms from lifeless branches.

He knew better than to be fooled. Though he'd learned to embrace the styles and habits of those times himself, he knew better than to believe they had been better. More elegant, perhaps, but also brutal, and dark. 

Granted, of course, it had been a long time since the girls who worked in establishments like theirs were pressed into their service unwillingly. With their history and immaculate reputation—well, with their clientele and what said clientele could afford, was a more accurate way of putting it—they were able to recruit the best, the most beautiful, the most talented. Women who entered this business because they enjoyed it—or, at least, were honest with themselves about where their skills lay.

It had not always been that way. Once upon a time the illustrious Kokakurou's workforce had consisted of the wives of men who preferred to run away from their debts; or their unfortunate daughters, raised in the lifestyle from such an early age they never knew there was any other kind of life outside the barred walls of their floating world. 

In other parts of Kyoto, and other cities scattered across Japan and the rest of the globe, things were still much that way. Only now immigrants had replaced destitute wives, illegals who were rarely missed by distant relations. You might have to scratch beneath the surface of neon lights and pulsating music to see the truth, but not very far. Though his place of business was clearly more ethical and law-abiding, Oriya would not justify what he did, no more than he could condone those less reputable establishments. He harbored no delusions that this was an honorable or glamorous way of life for anyone, whether it be forced or voluntary.

And yet . . .

It _did_ have history.

“You do your employees a disservice. You know that they consider themselves masters of a long-lost art.”

This was an age-old rebuke between them. Muraki would say it as he casually sipped his tea, as if he were merely correcting Oriya on his translation of a Classical poem.

He would say it as if he had gained that little gem of insight after hundreds of hours of careful observation and interviews with the girls, as though they were the subjects for some clinical trial he was conducting. As though it were sheer, self-evident pride that kept the old building standing after all these centuries.

When Oriya knew the Kokakurou didn't stand proud at all. 

It crouched. It waited till the cover of night, then it spread its legs.

“I know,” he would say nonetheless, occupying himself with the imperfections in the cup beneath the tips of his fingers as he slowly turned it round and round.

“And yet you continue to condescend to them, as though they were merely—”

“Whores?” He had scoffed. “What do you think a _tayuu_ is, Muraki? Under all that fancy wrapping.”

Muraki had not answered right away. He allowed time for a slow grin to develop, and for Oriya to guess what he was going to say before he said it.

“If that was how you felt about this business all along, why ever did you get into it?”

* * *

He snapped the cellphone shut. As he put it back in his pocket, he pulled out the pack of cigarettes purchased from the convenience store down the street. Nasty things, literally more distasteful than the pipe and spiced blend of tobacco he had left back in Kyoto; but that would have seemed unforgiveably out of place and time here, as out of place and time as silk robes and geta. It occupied a separate realm.

Besides, he needed to feel this particular burn in his lungs right now.

Oh, everything was fine back at the Kokakurou, his madam had called to inform him. When was it not? They never lacked for business. Especially now, at the start of the new year: old acquaintances being rekindled, new experiences tried. A regular customer, a rather esteemed client, had left a generous token of his thanks, along with the appropriate numbers of a few new parties interested in revisiting the establishment at a future date, having thoroughly enjoyed the services.

One of the girls had had to get an abortion, but she was fine now and swore it would not happen again. The madam insisted she did not want Oriya's financial compensation for the procedure, but he knew the girl would accept it just as he was offering, as part of the job. Or else the matter would not have been brought to his attention in the first place. He saw right through the madam's requisite assertion that she “had not wished to trouble you with the matter on your holiday.” It was, after all, the part she had to play.

They all had their parts to play.

Whether they came to those roles willingly, like his clients. Like the girl who understood the hazards of the job and had no qualms rectifying them. Or whether they filled their roles kicking and screaming.

As he had gone to his inheritance.

It often occurred to Oriya that, if his father had not gone to such an early grave, he would now be living a very different life. He might never have returned to Kyoto, taken over the Kokakurou. And how many things would have played out differently if he had not?

How many people would still be alive if Muraki had not followed him there?

Would their friendship be any different for it?

These were questions for which there were no answers. He could not go back in time, warn himself of what his best friend would become. Warn himself of what _he_ would become. It was useless to dwell on hypotheticals, just as it was somehow as natural as breathing.

He remembered now why he hated cigarettes. They tasted like Muraki. 

He exhaled, long and steady, but it would not get that taste out of his mouth and the back of his nostrils. He ground the butt into the dirt with the toe of his sneaker. Then, remembering where he was, bent and plucked it from the ground to dispose of properly.

Ukyo's roses watched him from where they stood leaning against the fence, a buffer between him and the soulless vista of suburban Tokyo sprawl. A living brocade of cream and gold and scarlet against a background of dark green silk, as vibrant as any _tayuu_ in all her finery, even in this cold mid-winter drizzle. He should have been proud of the artistry that had gone into them—into their _design_ , not just their care: the intelligence and dedication which showed in every perfectly formed petal, down to its basest molecular level.

Showed her devotion to the one they both loved in equal shares, despite what they both knew was best for them.

* * *

By the early 1930s, most of Asakusa had recovered from the Great Kanto Earthquake. Vast green expanses of new parks covered the old washed-out fields, and sidewalks and brick facades were cluttered with signboards and posters for the latest motion pictures, trendy cafes, and boutiques imported from all over the world. 

Yoshiwara, the old pleasure quarter of the city, where we lived, was a little slower to catch up. Some of the wooden structures built during the Restoration, which the earthquake had somehow left standing, leaned dangerously as though a stiff wind might topple them over at any time. The cheaper housing meant dirty kids running rampant in the streets, as families in situations even worse than ours moved into the neighborhood. To my sisters and myself, it was home. We knew how to make due with little. And how to spot a con man and give him a wide berth. We had raised one another to be industrious, so our small house was never allowed to look rundown. Nor was anything wasted. Chiemi was even something of a magician when it came to bringing new life into old tatami, saving us a small fortune on replacements. 

But as Mother was wont to remind us, in far more creative words, we were living in the slums. Even in squalor she had expensive tastes, as if she had been conditioned for them in the womb. So where Father saw an opportunity for survival, she saw continued insult to her character.

I must confess to taking after her in this regard. As comfortable as I may have felt when alone with my books in my own home, I was ashamed that any of my peers might discover just how deeply in debt my family was, and invented elaborate stories to prevent that from happening throughout my school years. Perhaps even more than my mother, I was fastidious about my outward appearance. I took on extra jobs and skipped meals just to be able to buy myself Western-style suits, which I then had to learn to tailor myself. I was determined to make the Tatsumi name synonymous with dedication, efficiency, and sobriety—everything my father had not. I presented those virtues with my person daily, in fine wool and starched shirts, in impeccable grooming and shoes polished nightly. Meanwhile, glasses and a well-set smile allowed me to mask any sign of frailty, or, indeed, human emotion from the public.

At my employer's urging—and with the help of a generous loan—I was even able to achieve my dream of attending university. Those few years I spent honing my mind were the most fulfilling of my life, though in retrospect I often wonder how I managed to fit my work, studies, and care of the household all into my daily schedule. I thought once that those days would last forever. But when they were over, it seemed as though they had passed in the blink of an eye.

* * *

It was during that time that I, in my youthful innocence, believed I had found the love of my life. 

Suzuran was her name, Lily-of-the-Valley. Though I'm certain it was not the name she had been born with. She was . . . well, shall we just say, a self-employed small-businesswoman.

I was twenty when we met. She was in her later twenties, perhaps thirty; I never asked. It was the spring of 1936, and I was commuting to university daily. My mind was wide open to all sorts of new and exotic ideas. And experiences. And despite what her name might suggest, there was nothing about her that was humble, plain, or easy to overlook. 

She was a modern girl through and through. Though a silk kimono and kanazashi would have done her no injustice, she insisted the old fashions of the Edo period and the floating world were dead. She kept up on the latest motion pictures from America, taxi-danced at the Parisian-style dance halls, and modeled her looks after the Wrays and Harlows of that new and glamorous world. Hair in curls, cigarillo between fingers, and a haughty, husky slur to match her bedroom eyes. A silhouette-hugging gown and one bare white shoulder peeking out from beneath a bulky fur given her by one of her many “boys.” 

She would use that word as though there should never be any doubt in my mind I was not one of them, though I suppose the only difference between us was what we could each afford to pay. Ours may have been an intellectual relationship at its core, mine and Suzuran's, from the moment we met to the point sometime during the war we drifted wordlessly apart; she had a fiercely independent mind, and far less compunction than myself in voicing her opinions on the matters of the day, especially where they concerned the liberation of women. I felt as though I could tell her anything, confess all my troubles, and my words would be swallowed up in her eyes like whispers into a well, never to resurface.

But it was not a friendship wholly free of desire either, nor was it sexless. Sometimes she would charge me for the pleasure of her company; nothing unreasonable for services rendered. At others, if the mood so took her, she was caught up on rent, or if our schedules left only enough time for something playfully hurried, I was . . . what? A diversion for her, I suppose. An innocent, for a change of pace. A pawn in the game of life, like herself, running as fast as he could just to stay in the same place. Not someone who could afford to buy her fur coats for her trouble, that was certain. 

Even on those occasions, however, I could never quite bring myself to think of her as a professional, a lady of the evening—as anything other than my trusted confidante. I would tend to see her toward the beginning of her day—around my lunch breaks or in the early afternoon—and counted myself privileged that I was allowed a glimpse of who she was, who she really was, before the costumes and the mask went on. 

Yet behind her rouge and painted smile, her slinky Western ensembles and Chinese dresses, I saw no trace of the quiet suffering I was always attempting to hide behind my own veneer. To my younger self, just coming into my manhood, there was a confidence, a worldly wisdom about her that I found lacking in myself. No matter to me that that worldliness must have come at a price dealt repeatedly by my own sex. I envied and adored her all the more for it, for to me she seemed free.

* * *

“You could always leave,” Suzuran said. “If you wanted to. No one could blame you if you did.”

She was right, after a sort. Society would not judge me harshly, when so many of my generation had already forsaken their parents.

But _I_ would know what I had done. I would have abandoned my sisters, who had already shouldered so much more of the burden than they deserved; I could not begrudge them what liberation they had found in careers and friendships outside the house. And Mother would curse my name until the day I died if I ever left her. 

Only Father would congratulate me if I actually managed to escape, for succeeding where he had failed for so long.

“And you would run away with me?” Of course, the chances of that happening were less than none. I think I smiled as I shook my head. “No. I couldn't do that to her. As tempting as it may be. I would never be able to live with myself if something happened to her because I took the selfish route.”

“And it isn't selfish of her to hold you back from seeking your own happiness?”

She must not have expected an answer to that one; nor did I have one to give her.

“Anyway, doesn't she have other family to fall back on?”

Not that I knew of. “Her parents are long dead. I think. I doubt any of her siblings would want anything to do with her. They have families of their own to support.”

I doubted some of them even remembered their youngest sister. Or else they conveniently forgot her existence. From the time I was born, it was Father's family that I had any sort of contact with. The kind uncle who ruffled my hair and slipped me candy when I called on Father at his place of business. The aunt who popped in only long enough to drop off some fruit from her garden, glancing skittishly around like a stray cat, ready to bolt at the first sign of our mother. The grandmother who bounced me on her knee in the shadiest recesses of my memory, who one year simply disappeared and was never mentioned again.

“I thought you said she came from nobility.”

“She did,” I told her. “But my mother married for love, and look how far that got her.”

I looked up at her, expecting a rebuttal. Or at very least some witty retort. Instead, the tobacco smoke lazily unfurled from between her lax, naked lips like a living thing. Even without her makeup, the shape of her stare and the alluring pout of her lips had a natural, inscrutable aloofness to them. Finding them suddenly turned on me, I began to panic.

Before I could say a word, she stubbed out her cigarillo, and in a second was kneeling behind my shoulders, her tiny hands heavy and warm on each one.

As with every time we touched, the urge to flee rose up on instinct. I willed myself to relax as she massaged my shoulders in that way she thought was comforting to me. A voice inside said it would be rude to reject her kindness. And, after all, why would I continue to call on her if I did not like how she made me feel? Slowly I felt the muscles untense and the blood flow back into them. I could taste the cloves on her smoke as she exhaled by my ear, and let my eyes fall closed in surrender.

Such was the almost magical sway she held over me. My worldly problems, though never entirely forgotten, seemed suddenly quite minuscule in her hands—like the buildings of some town far in the distance, too far away to matter. Against my will, they faded further out of my reach, and it shamed me to realize I was happy to see them go.

“You are not your parents, Seiichirou,” she said as her hands slowed and finally came to a stop where my shoulders met my spine, like a train pulling into the station. “I can tell, because you're too damn tense for your own good.” 

She gave me that wry smile of hers that said she already knew I knew that. Just as she knew nothing she said would change the way I was.

I leaned in, compelled by a jealous urge to capture those wry lips for my own. Pretend for a few moments that I was the only one who had ever tasted them. And she melted into my kiss with an ease that even my young, naïve self could not pretend was the result of anything but long practice. She put her small white hands on the fronts of my shoulders, and lifted herself into my lap as lightly as if she were a cloud. 

That was how she always felt when I folded my arms about her—as though that solid body were a mere illusion, which would evaporate if I only pressed too hard. I should have given her more credit. She was more solid in that world than I was.

* * *

“I can't help feeling he's going to do something terrible.”

The sounds of their eating continued uninterrupted even as she said this. Only if one was looking for it—as he was—would one notice the subtle signs, the unconscious gestures betraying her anxiety. The uncomfortable pull of her lips that was almost but never quite a grimace as she fought with herself over whether, not what, to say. The briefest of moments when her fingers left her chopsticks to tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear.

She did not look up at him, though his gaze was waiting to meet hers. Perhaps because it was ready to meet hers.

“Something terrible.” Oriya turned the words over as if to himself. “As in, something different from anything else he's done?”

The unspoken challenge hovered between them as the awkward play of picking food up but never eating it continued. It dared her to refute him. He should have known she would not disappoint.

“You don't know him like I do.”

“Oh, I think I know him quite well enough—”

“You don't know how he was before Saki,” Ukyo said, these words harder than the others. Bold-faced, underlined. Undeniably true. “You don't know how he just changed overnight.”

But you do? he wanted so badly to ask her. You know what it was that turned my best friend into a monster? You can tell me with absolute certainty what event, or what gene, is responsible for making him what he's become? 

Because how nice it would be to have the answer. From a medical professional, no less. To know it wasn't his fault, it never was. To know there was never anything he could have done. 

“I just need you to do one thing for me, Oriya. If you still value our friendship.”

“And you think I have that kind of power over him?” _If I had, don't you think I would have exercised it before?_

“Just one thing,” Ukyo insisted. As if it really were such a small little thing. “Save him from himself.”

“Why me?”

“Because. God knows you love him more than I ever could.”

* * *

That was the last time they had seen each other, almost two years ago. Months before Muraki revealed his final plan to Oriya, and then disappeared.

Oriya had not agreed. He had promised nothing. Yet he had still failed her in this one thing.

_Save him from himself. Just this one thing._

How had she known? Was it an old betrothed's intuition that sent that premonitory chill up her spine?

Or was she really as kindred a spirit to him as she claimed?

Is that why falling was so god-damned easy? he wondered as he slid back inside the house.

* * *

I did not run away, though god knows I wanted to. 

As a real possibility, however, it never crossed my mind. Running away from one's duties was the action of a coward. It was the action of a man like my father.

Certainly, if I were honest, I understood why sometimes he only dared sneak back in the dead of the night, and other times did not set foot inside the house for days, if not weeks on end. Mother's mood swings had grown inexorably worse since we moved to Yoshiwara. Frustration with her surroundings did not help to mend the distance growing between her and Father. If anything, it had expanded from a mere strait to a gulf.

On top of which, he must have realized his children were able to take care of themselves—had been taking care of themselves since they'd learned to boil rice—and that he had become as much a stranger to them as our mother had to him. What, honestly, was left for him in that house?

And yet. 

I could excuse his behavior all I wanted, but it would not change what he was: a failure. A breaker of vows. A dastardly do-nothing of a father and a husband.

It shames me somewhat to admit that I hated him for it, though it shames me perhaps less than it should.

We are all, I suppose, at one point in our lives or another, slaves to feelings we cannot control, and that hatred was mine. Mother, for her part, hadn't even the will power to lift herself out of her despair. Anger was for her a crutch at best; it did nothing to mend the problem. 

And it sickened me—oh, how it sickened me that the tiny house we shared would begin to reek of mildew and rotting onions and whatever cheap liquor she could find to drown her sorrows in if I were away on business for even a few days. She was a grown woman, albeit grown up from a spoiled girl, yet it was myself and my poor sisters who worked ourselves ragged for her sake, every free waking moment we were able, from the very moment we had become able. While I was working so hard toward my own education and future career, I was at the same time saddled with the care of this miserable woman, who either could not see or else refused to acknowledge how much of themselves her children had sacrificed for her. 

Did she think it was what she deserved? I asked myself that question so many times. 

And if so, what did _we_ deserve? Were her own children due any happiness of their own? Or was even that too presumptuous of us? Were we no more than penance for a slap-dash marriage, forced to suffer our own existence because our parents refused to acknowledge what should have been, what was by rights, _their_ burden?

For all I tried to reason one out, there was no answer to be found. Nor could I see a way out of my prison. There were evenings spent with my coworkers at a restaurant close to the office, that I wished I could crawl down inside of my empty glass and emerge through the other side in a world where I had no parents, no filial obligation, no strife—some perverse fantasy inside my head where right was left and they had both died long ago, leaving me not one yen of wealth nor debt. I must have been a bore to everyone around me, unable even to shake my thoughts from the stagnant home life that awaited me at the end of the evening. No one was ever anything but polite in my company, but I am sure I exuded my bitterness like a foul odor. You would not know it to look at my smiling face, but come within arm's reach and you would surely see the pathetic young man behind the facade.

The young man who hated his mother. Hated her because, despite it all, I could not leave her if I wanted to. It was simply what I was programmed to do. And I blamed her for it.

How selfish I was. Little did I know that blame was a luxury I could not afford. Blinded by resentment for what my life had become, I was unaware what enemies my mother had made for herself. I had no idea anyone might actually wish her harm, least of all herself.

* * *

She was wearing her wedding kimono when I found her. As if she needed anything else to tell the world what had started her down the road to this. 

Blood bloomed like a rose from under the blade of the kitchen knife lodged in her body. A dark red rose, against the unnatural whiteness of her body.

It seemed to be unfolding still as I stood in the doorway, too stunned to do anything but stare, while a policeman tried needlessly to bar my entrance.

Chiemi saw me then.

She had been crying. Echoes of it wavered in her voice despite her best efforts. “I only came to take her shopping with me. Just like every Wednesday. I swear, Seiichirou, I just—”

Then the reality of it must have caught up with her. She caught a sob in the cup of her hand, as though afraid it might escape and scurry under the walls. “She's _dead!_ Oh _God!_ What are we supposed to do?”

I had no answer for her. I, her big brother, the rock and brain of the household, had no solution to this problem.

Like a puppet, I slipped away from the officer and went to kneel at Mother's side. It was as though someone else were moving the paddles—as though the room was a stage before me, myself and my sister and the policemen—all wooden dolls, the lot of us, shifted around our tableau by invisible hands, just trying to do what we thought was correct, what our duty demanded.

I remember thinking—wishing—someone would wake me, and I would find myself back in my office, as though I had never left. I would finish my filing for the day and walk home as I always did, only this time at the end of it I would find Mother flipping through her magazines, or listening to the radio from her futon. Sullen, ignoring her children, but blinking. Alive.

Not like this, so still, so white in her formal kimono—a pale swastika on the tatami. I tried to remember how she had looked in life—the color of her cheeks, the rising of her chest for a sigh when I left her that very morning—but I could not. Those were things I'd given up noticing long ago, if I ever had. I wanted to reach out and touch her, assure myself that she was really dead, but I could not move an inch and my hands curled into fists in my trousers. What would it accomplish? I could not stop that spot of blood from spreading, let alone return it to her body.

I had hardly touched her in life; what right had I to start now?

* * *

“You just found her like this?” 

My sister had begun to pace the room. Her arms wrapped tightly about her middle, as if the pressure on her diaphragm might keep the tears inside just long enough for the police to finish their work and leave us. I expected her blame at any moment. _Where were you when she needed you? You should have caught this. You should have been there to stop it. You were her oldest—her son!_

But she only turned her red-rimmed eyes toward me, let out a rattling breath. “ _Why_ , Seiichirou? I thought we were doing well. I thought she was finally—”

Happy? Neither of us could bring ourselves to finish that lie. It only proved how deeply in denial we had been.

“I'll make arrangements.” I'll fix this, I wanted to say, from habit, but there was nothing to fix. Despite the terror I felt inside, a strange calm seemed to have come over me. Perhaps it was the futility of it all—the knowledge that, this time, nothing I did would have any effect. 

Or maybe it was just the kind of man I was.

“One of us has to tell Father—”

“Forget it. He won't be coming back. We don't owe that man anything anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

My sister's lips just moved wordlessly, as though trying to suck back in what she had already let slip.

“Are you saying he already knows about this?” When I had had to find out this way?

“Forget I said anything. We have enough to concern ourselves with right now—”

“Damn it, Chiemi, I think I have a right to know if our father was here!”

She let out her breath all in a rush. She would not meet my eyes.

“All right. I saw him as I was coming up the street. He was going the other way, in a hurry. I don't think he even recognized me—”

I was on my feet before she could utter another word. Shock turned to rage inside me, boiling up with my grief in a violent chemical reaction. Never before had I felt an urge to inflict harm on another human being, but I did then. It frightened me. I was unsure how far it could lead me, if I allowed it to. If I lost control of it. Nor was I sure at that moment that I wanted to control it.

Chiemi must have read my mind. She was at my side in a heartbeat, gripping my shoulders so tight I would have bruises beneath my shirt. “It's not what you're thinking, I saw his face, Seiichi—he was _terrified_ —”

“Of course he was! Just who do you think is responsible for this?”

“She did it to herself. You _know_ she did—”

“He's the one to blame, it doesn't matter if he held the knife or not. He murdered her!”

“He didn't murder anyone,” she said to the policemen around us, who had begun to stare.

“Why are you defending him? He's been stealing from her for years! She must have finally had enough, she must have finally stood up to him. He had the motive, the opportunity—he's a drunkard and a coward, and who can predict what garbage like that will do when confronted. He's always hated her. It was no secret he ruined her life; he had to take even that from her, too? What are you all still doing standing around? You should be out there arresting the bastard!”

The slap was unexpected. My sisters had never raised a hand against me. No one had ever raised a hand against anyone in our family, except our mother against our father. The sting of the edges of my glasses cutting into my skin startled me like a plunge into icy water. I stared at my sister in shock, and glimpsed in her eyes for an instant a hatred to which I had never been subject before, yet knew at once had been there all along.

The next moment, it had vanished, replaced by disbelief for what she had done. 

“Seiichirou. . . .” It squeezed out of her in a whisper, the only word she seemed to trust herself to speak. At once an apology and an admonition, and a plea for the sympathy one sibling deserved from another.

But I could not let it go.

“She wouldn't take her own life.” In my mind, Father had already been tried and found guilty, one way or another. He'd led her to this point, whatever had ultimately transpired in that living room. She could not have gotten there alone. “She wouldn't do this to us.”

“She did.”

I knew she was right, of course. Just as I knew deep in my soul who was really to blame. Only I did not want to believe it.

* * *

About the next few years, there's not much to say.

* * *

Nor will I trouble you at length with the details of my own death. 

You can read all about the horror of that night in the newspaper archives, in the stories of survivors: how the city was transformed in a matter of minutes into a hell on earth.

Suffice it to say I suffered, but not for very long.


	2. Chapter 2

I awoke in a strange bed, the cherry trees in full bloom outside my window.

My first thought was that I had somehow survived that night and slept the month away in a hospital. The new buds on the branches had been closed tight against the March chill that night when I went to bed. Though my memory was hazy, somehow I remembered that much.

But as consciousness returned to me, seemingly in exponential leaps, so grew my certainty that I was dead, though how I had come to that conclusion I could not say. Perhaps it was the inexplicable lightness of my body, quite a new experience after the last few, dragging years of my life. Or something in the charge of the air, the lack of a hospital smell in what was quite clearly an infirmary.

More likely it was the utter lack of wounds staring back at me when I turned my hands over in my lap. I was expecting burns, though why remained a mystery to me at that time. The answers seemed to be in a part of my brain to which my access had been shut off, much to my frustration.

The door opened, and a man appeared in the Western suit and fedora that was common among men of my time.

The effect that I suppose was meant to calm me I found unsettling.

“Where am I?” I asked him.

He sighed and removed his hat. Not so much in condolence as weariness. He must have had to explain this very same situation dozens of times, and I was just one more charge whose reaction to the most dire news imaginable he could never be wholly prepared for.

“Mr Tatsumi,” he began, “this might come as something of a shock to you—”

“But I'm dead?” He seemed surprised by my matter-of-fact tone. But how else was I supposed to take it? It was a fact I could not change. “I have to admit, I didn't expect it to be like . . . this. To be conscious.”

My grim reaper let slip a sly smile at that, relaxing his tense frame. “You and everyone else. I guess I can skip the part where I try to convince you this isn't some sort of practical joke. 

“But all joking aside, I should inform you before we get too ahead of ourselves that this isn't Heaven. Nor is it Hell. More like . . . the place in between them and the living, if that makes it easier to process. 

“You're in Meifu, Mr Tatsumi, the Land of the Dead. Or, if you prefer, old Yomi. Specifically, we're in Enma-cho, the bureaucratic hub and where all the action generally happens. Your soul has already been judged by King Enma, and sent here to be reinstated in a physical body as a shinigami, a servant of King Enma's will within his Ministry of the Dead. It's a great honor, and though you probably don't remember any of it, you did give your consent.”

“I'm sorry,” I interrupted him, guessing this speech might go on for some time. Enma, judgment, shinigami . . . I must have laughed. “This is all a little too much. I heard the stories when I was a child, same as everyone else, but you honestly expect me to believe—”

“That they're all true? Yes. Well, more or less. You'll find some parts have been greatly exaggerated. Like the lakes of fire. Other parts, not enough, in my opinion.”

As I went to rub my eyes, I realized my glasses were not there. Of course, my Virgil had seemed out-of-focus, but I had been too disoriented at first to wonder why. “My glasses—”

“Oh. Of course.” He lifted them from the bedside table and placed them, folded, in my hand. “Unfortunately that isn't something death can cure. We shinigami might be able to regenerate ourselves from any injury we sustain from this point forward, but we are stuck with all the same imperfections we had when we died. I suppose some of us should just be thankful we still had our own teeth when we passed.”

Now that I could bring him into focus, I blinked up at the man, half expecting the corpse-like visage of some vengeful kabuki ghost. I was pleasantly surprised to see his complexion was hale, completely lifelike, with the warm, wrinkled eyes of a man who was perhaps once a doting grandfather, or a well-respected shopkeep. Perhaps even a civil servant, aged prematurely by the stress of his office.

He raised his eyebrows at me. “Any questions so far?”

A million and one. But none of them were making it in any concrete form to my lips, so I could only shake my head at him dumbly.

Which for reasons unknown to me prompted another sigh. And, this time, a slight smile. “You will. Come on. Let's get you up and dressed and I'll give you a tour of operations. Your new boss wants to meet you.”

I dismissed his offer of assistance, and he waited outside the door while I hoisted myself out of bed. Every muscle in my body pulled as though it hadn't been used in decades, as if it had been lying dormant much longer than a month. Of course, my real body, back in the world of the living, would have been cremated; this one was just a clever facsimile. But strangely enough, it still felt like my body. Fingers and toes ended in the right places. It was my body, only better, stronger. A suit of clothes had been left for me on a chair against the wall. The cut was somewhat outdated, but it fit fairly well, and it felt more like my old skin than the hospital yukata I'd woken in. 

When I fixed my collar and tie in the infirmary mirror, it was _my_ face I saw staring back at me above _my own_ hands, and it was not changed or marred as I inexplicably feared it should be. Though dead I may have been, I looked and felt exactly like the twenty-nine-year-old self I had been when I went to bed the night of March the ninth.

Assured by my more human appearance, my guide—I would learn shortly that his name was Morita, and that he was the second-most senior shinigami in our department—led me down crisp marble hallways braced by dark wood wainscoting and the scent of old varnish, past the various departments that made up the Ministry of Death. This would be my home from now on, I thought as I took in my surroundings, this mirror image of the diet building in Tokyo. Nor did the idea strike me as unpleasant. It was the sort of building I felt a deep affinity for, one which promised the meticulous organization of information. I had never tired of university life, and at the first whiff of aging wood I longed to immerse myself in that atmosphere of academia again. The smell of India ink, the feel of old balance sheets under my fingers. Though dead, I could begin to see this place as home, and hoped that whatever shadowy board had chosen me for this afterlife had seen it fit to put me behind a ledger.

Presently we arrived at our destination: the offices of the Summons Division.

“It's kind of complicated,” my guide groaned when I asked what was done there. “You see, very few people in the world really want to die, but most of them don't have a choice. However, a very small percentage of those people manage to find some loophole, some way of hanging on even after they should by all rights be dead, often by unnatural means.”

“Unnatural means?”

“You'll see soon enough.”

The office was bustling with activity, full of men and women of varying age and styles of dress typing on typewriters, rifling through files, chatting on telephones, making tea. It looked and sounded like a newspaper office—or at least how the motion pictures of the time portrayed it.

These were to be my coworkers, for all of eternity as far as I knew. At that time, I was still too overwhelmed by the news of my death and waking up here to attempt memorizing faces. That would all come in time.

But there was one among them who managed to capture my attention, if only for a brief moment. A man slightly younger than myself, in his mid-twenties I guessed, who had tried to adopt the fashions of the time but could not help betraying his Taisho origins. Maybe it was the rakish way his dark hair kept coming out of its slick, Valentino style, or how the trench coat he wore even indoors only made him look like a character out of a foreign hard-boiled film.

As Morita led me through the room to the office at the far end, its occupants glanced up at me one by one, some nodding their greetings to a fellow shinigami in place of a formal introduction. When _his_ eyes flickered toward me over his motionless typewriter, I thought for sure I was imagining their color. They were the queerest shade of purple, almost the color of Burgundy wine, like that which the ancients called Tyrian purple. Unusual—but then my own blue eyes had been known to raise a few eyebrows, on those occasions anyone looked too closely, and more than a few questions about my mother's fidelity.

When we stepped through the fogged-glass door of the department chief's office, I promptly forgot all about him.

* * *

The man behind the desk was already rising as we entered. He had a Clark Gable mustache and graying temples, and eyes of such a shape they seemed perpetually mournful, as though reflecting some inner well of deep sadness. He looked to have been in his late thirties or early forties when he died, though for all I knew, his true age could have been twice that.

“Your new recruit is here, Chief.” Morita stood at attention beside his desk, fedora behind his back. “One Mr Tatsumi Seiichirou. Tatsumi, may I introduce Mr Saigen Issho, Chief of the Summons Division.”

In place of a bow, Saigen extended his hand to me over the desk. It was telling of something, I was sure; probably just as telling that the Western gesture did not faze me in the least, and I was able to respond in kind.

His handshake was firm, but impersonal. Professional. I felt an immediate kinship with him. The kind of respect I heard in Morita's tone when he spoke of the man. “I trust Morita has filled you in on why you're here.”

He indicated a chair across from his, and we both sat. Morita helped himself to a finger of whiskey from the chief's personal supply.

“I got the gist,” I told him. That I had died. That I was now in the employ of this Ministry of the Dead. That my new career involved seeing to the living who refused to die.

“Did he tell you what you would be doing?”

My silence was answer enough.

Saigen fixed me a steady gaze. I knew he would be watching for my reaction, and was determined not to give him any reason to doubt my employment.

“We shinigami,” he began, “have the singularly unpleasant task of reaping those aforementioned men and women's souls and bringing them to the Ministry to await their judgment. By force, if necessary. And it is often necessary. I won't lie to you, Tatsumi: this isn't an easy job. Spiritually, it can be quite difficult, and there will be times when you wish you weren't chosen to do this. But though it may sound harsh, what we do, it is a matter of preserving the very order of existence.”

Over the next hour, the chief of the Summons Division outlined what was expected of me in my new position: operating procedure, official policy, living arrangements—as they were still rather ironically called—and funds. To his credit, he fielded my questions with great patience, as though he had not had to answer them hundreds of times before. He impressed upon me the importance and honor of our position, despite how harsh it seemed on the surface. Maintaining the proper and natural order of the universe was not a task that could be entrusted to just anyone. The fact that I was there, sitting across from him in that office, was evidence enough that Enma had judged me to have a singular type of soul, one whose capabilities and sense of duty were above reproach. I thanked him, as was only natural, though Saigen's frown made it quite clear he had not meant it to be a compliment.

“As I mentioned before,” he said as our time drew to a close, “none of our shinigami work alone.” 

At this point Morita rose from his own seat and went to the door, gesturing to someone outside.

“You have already been assigned a partner to accompany you on your cases. He will get you settled in, and answer any further questions you might have about your duties in the field. And you're in luck.” This was accompanied by a smile, the first I had seen on the chief. “You two will be overseeing summons in one of our quietest sectors, which is saying something in wartime. Hey, Tsuzuki.”

I followed his gaze to the doorway, where the young man in the trench coat now stood. His purple eyes were wide and boyish, making him seem much younger than his twenty-six years, as they shifted from the chief to me.

“Meet Tatsumi Seiichirou, your new partner,” Saigen said to him. “Tatsumi, this is Tsuzuki Asato from Sector Two, Kyushu.”

We exchanged pleasantries, Tsuzuki greeting me with an exuberance that reminded me of a young puppy, wagging his tail. Eager to make a new friend. It seemed quite genuine at the time. I did not yet know how much of that exuberance was a mask, just as I could not know the reason for Saigen and Morita's clandestine glance.

“I had a feeling it would be you when you walked in,” Tsuzuki said. “Hey, are you ready to learn the ropes? The Chief just gave us a new case this morning. Don't worry, it's an easy one. I can fill you in on the way.”

“Trial by fire, huh?” The choice of words sounded ironic to my ears only after I had said them.

I looked to Saigen, about to ask if we were done. He dismissed us with a wave. “You're halfway there already. And, Tatsumi. If you want my advice, defer to Tsuzuki in all matters. He might seem like a royal screw-up, but he comes with high commendations from King Enma.”

* * *

My first shock as an official shinigami was teleportation.

The second, discovering it was already June in the living world. I had been dead for three full months.

“But I thought . . . the cherry trees—”

“Oh, yeah.” Tsuzuki chuckled, but it wasn't at my expense. “I guess we forgot to tell you. They're like that year-round in Meifu.”

“Is it some sort of hex?” I was finding the existence of magic and the supernatural a hard pill to swallow, never mind the logical inconsistencies. But, when in Rome. . . .

“M-m, not that I know of. I always just assumed it was because they were dead, like us. Eternally unchanging. Same goes for the bugs. It's the same kind of logic behind why you can never cut your hair in Meifu.”

“Let me guess. It never grows back?”

“Quite the opposite! No matter what you do to yourself, your shinigami body always wants to revert to the state it was in when you died. Which is a huge asset in the field, believe me. Especially when you encounter a demon—which doesn't happen that often!” he amended when he saw my disgust.

“So, if I follow, you're saying we can't be hurt.”

“You can be physically injured,” Tsuzuki explained, “and it _does_ hurt. The thing is, it's only temporary. So, after a while, you stop being afraid of getting wounded on the job, knowing your body is just going to heal itself. Even what would usually kill you is just a big inconvenience here.”

I smiled to myself. “Death loses its sting.”

He shared my smile, though it seemed even then as though we were reacting to different punchlines.

“Anyway,” Tsuzuki said, “I apologize for kidnapping you from the office just after you arrived. I know you're still getting used to things. I just figured it would help you think if you could get out of there.”

“Of course.” I thought I could see where he was going. “Your case load must be unusually heavy, what with the war.”

To my surprise, he blinked at me as though I had mistakenly spoken some other language.

Then: “I guess so. I only meant that you might like some place more familiar to help you get your bearings. But that's true too. Usually most of the guys would be out in their respective regions with only a skeleton crew left at the home office, but every sector has been so loaded down lately. . . . You just have to get used to stepping on each other's toes, is all. For a little while, at least.”

“Does every unusual death come through here? What I mean is—” The question sounded awkward to me as soon as I said it, so I could sympathize with the puzzled look on Tsuzuki's face. “Clearly there is a high number of deaths coming in at a time like this. I'm sure a disproportionate number are unusual—”

“Oh. Yeah, you'd think so, but that isn't necessarily the case. Most of the deaths caused by enemy attacks get processed normally. Of course there's the issue of soldiers stationed overseas at their time of passing, but we have a separate extradition department set up for that. We've been working with the death ministries in other countries around the world to have our dead sent back here for judgment, and, likewise, we ship theirs back to them. And, of course, Enma is overseeing the Korean Peninsula and the coast of Asia until we get some conclusion to this war in the living world.”

“As on Earth, so in Heaven.”

“You could say that. In short, everyone gets to go home when they die. It's one human right that is literally undeniable by our respective governments. It's actually kind of reassuring to know that while everyone's fighting one another up here in Chijou, down there we have a good working relationship with our so-called enemies.”

I would get used to thinking of the respective worlds of the living and dead in those terms: one above ground, the other below. Though Meifu and Chijou technically existed on separate yet overlapping planes, everyone here still spoke as they had when they were living, imagining the realm of the dead to be some kingdom buried deep in the fiery bowels of the Earth. All that was missing from the picture were the lakes of fire and acid, though I had it on good authority those had been paved over centuries ago. Even then Lord Enma outsourced karmic punishment.

“Many souls do get lost in wartime. You are right about that. But just as many get lost during times of peace, too. And out of thousands of deaths every day, only a small number of them actually require special attention. Our job is twofold: Find those who are hanging on long after their appointed time and send them on their way; and investigate those who have lost their lives way ahead of schedule through unnatural means, and find out the cause.”

“I wasn't aware we would be investigating murder.”

“M-m, not just any kind of murder. You see, Enma has this book, the kiseki, that alerts us when it finds a discrepancy between whose soul should be arriving for judgment and who actually shows up.”

“Like an accounting error. Finally, something in this place I can understand.”

“Actually, that's not far off. It might surprise you to know your typical, run-of-the-mill murder is actually one of the things that makes it into the kiseki just fine. It's the truly bizarre stuff the book can't figure out that we get sent to investigate: curses, ghost vendettas, unlawfully broken pacts with supernatural beings, that sort of thing. Anyway,” he said, noting my skepticism, “once we're notified of the error, we track down the offending party and . . . help them on their way.”

“So, we kill people.”

“Ours is a mission of mercy,” Tsuzuki said distantly, as though it were a line he had rehearsed many times. “I don't like to see it as killing, although I guess if you want to be technical about it, that is what we do. But these people are already dead by the time they're made known to us, for all intents and purposes. They no longer exist in a way that's natural, and even if they don't yet realize it, it would only be cruel to them to let them continue on in such a way.”

At the time, with the memories of the life I was so recently split from still fresh in my mind—as if they had literally happened yesterday—I was not sure I could see his point. Nor that I wanted to. At the time, I was still thinking selfishly, nor could I have known that he was speaking from personal experience. He never actually let me see the scars that crossed his wrists, healed up and reopened again and again; but with time, I came to know about them. 

With time I would understand his reasons for convincing himself that what he was doing filled some noble purpose, even while he secretly condemned himself for his part in it.

At the time, I could only take him at his word when he said, “You'll see what I mean.”

* * *

The first soul we were sent to retrieve as partners belonged to a woman with a terminal illness who was waiting for her son to return from the war. As far as our cases went, it was not a complicated one—no ghosts or summoned demons, curses or mystical artifacts to deal with, no puzzles to figure out—but the sheer longing of this mother for her child affected me in a way I was not prepared for. She was not very old, but the wartime economic depression combined with her illness had left her malnourished, a pale skeleton of a woman. 

It did not seem to matter. That she would hold on so far through all that pain, against the screaming of her cells for death, just to see him one more time—

She possessed a strength of will that my mother had never exhibited toward me or my sisters. Nor did I think I could ever find it in myself—neither as a brother or son, nor as a father, or someone's lover. She wanted so badly for us to wait, sure that her boy would be home any hour, any minute. She pleaded, bargained with us, cried with what little strength she had left. But she never rose to anger, though she would have been within her rights to hate us, we who were there to end her life.

In the end, she went quietly.

The entire time, Tsuzuki smiled like a Buddha. He sympathized with the woman—just as he sympathized with all our cases, even the ones that had only themselves to blame for their summons. Yet he performed his duties with the grace and integrity of a shinigami who had decades of experience. One might never have known how much each death troubled him, to look at him.

As we left the woman's house, he turned to me and said, “Can I buy you a drink?”

Surprised by his casual words, I turned to look at him. The question died on my lips, however, when I saw, for the first time, how fragile that perpetual smile of his truly was. A thin mask, that would take only a thin crack to shatter. I knew well enough to watch my step.

“I know, it sounds callous of me,” he said when he saw my face, “but sometimes in this business you just need to feel normal afterwards. Alive—though that might not be the best word for it. . . . I'm just not really sure how else to explain it.”

I lowered my eyes to show I understood. Perhaps our own deaths had lost their sting, but not necessarily so everyone else's. “We don't need to head back?”

“Her soul can make its way to Meifu just fine now, and our reports can wait a few hours.” 

Content that I had acquiesced—or, more accurately, that I had not refused—when he turned to me this time, the smile was genuine. Warm, and brilliant. After the darkness of our case, I felt more deserving of the shade.

“Have you ever been to Kyoto?”

“Kyoto?” It came out of me in a laugh. “Ah, no. Sad to say I never had the chance. Why?”

“Well then, there's a great little place I'd like to introduce you to. What?” he said to my shock when he grabbed my wrist. “You didn't think we were going to walk, did you?”

* * *

I was still getting used to the idea that I could teleport myself just about anywhere in Japan or its underworld equivalent just by thinking about it. Of course, in those days we didn't call it “teleportation.” That came later, after the science fiction novels. Back then there was no official term. Our elders called it falling. As in, “I'm going to fall up to Chijou.” And despite the moniker, it was a skill that actually took some effort to master. Hence Tsuzuki's all but dragging me through space by the wrist to get to our destination.

But was it worth the trouble! It was the middle of summer, and the old capital shimmered in the heat. Cicadas sang in the canopies of the manicured parks that surrounded the old temples and castles. Everything was just as I imagined it—which was the queer thing. Kyoto seemed hardly touched by the war, as if we had wandered into some memory of a richer time.

“It's one of the only places that hasn't been touched yet by the bombs,” Tsuzuki told me. “Rumor has it the higher-ups in America have a soft spot for Kyoto.”

“It would be tragic to lose this much history,” I agreed. 

Yet there was an arrogant logic to thinking one city should be spared while all the others suffered death and destruction on a biblical scale, for no other reason than that Kyoto's old temples and brothels were the most famous. There was something of an air of denial about a city that went about its daily business as if the world had not changed around it in centuries.

It was also an island of peace in the midst of the war, a respite from what unspeakable horrors the living committed on one another. Consequently, the very word “break” took on a deeper, much more powerful meaning for the two of us on that beautiful summer day, and all the others we would spend there. We were so blissfully ignorant of what was to come, now that I look back on those times with the clarity of hindsight.

It slipped out of me as we walked: “Do you ever wonder if maybe there was more that you could do?”

“What do you mean?” Tsuzuki asked in that manner that said he knew exactly what I meant.

“With the war going on. If what you say is correct, then we've been given a unique chance with these bodies. We can no longer die, and we'll only recover from physical injury.” 

He stretched himself taller beside me, made a sound that was not quite a clearing of his throat, and though I wondered if he was trying to tell me I needn't go on, I felt compelled to have it all out. Perhaps for myself more than for him. 

“Couldn't we do something?” I lowered my voice, suddenly nervous we might be overheard in our scheming, we beings from the pages of old-wives' tales. “To end this war. Why should we be stuck here—why not assign us to Okinawa or the Philippines, or wherever the fighting is? Where we could possibly make a difference?”

“We _do_ have people stationed in those places,” Tsuzuki said. “The War Division is down there right now, sorting out the losses on either side. Enma needs us here right now, holding down the fort, keeping everything running business-as-usual in the main islands.”

Until the fighting finally reaches them too, I could almost hear him think.

“Besides, I like to think we _are_ making a difference.”

“But couldn't the likes of us—”

“Influence the outcome of this war? Stop the fighting?” He shook his head, forced a laugh. “Don't think it hasn't crossed my mind once or twice. But that kind of thinking gets you nowhere. Except deeper into guilt, I guess. Even if it were allowed . . .”

Yes? I desperately wanted to know how he would have finished that sentence, but he merely shook his head.

“No. Trust me. It's easier to just carry on with this job without asking too many questions, and be thankful for what few victories you can get.”

“Victories, hm. . . .” Was that how he saw them?

Was that what he considered the woman who was waiting for a son who would never return?

“I like to believe we do make a difference, even if it's only to one, maybe two lives at a time. Start thinking you can save everyone, and you'll only drive yourself mad. Now! if I could just remember what street this cafe was on again. You'll love it, Tatsumi. It may look like a hole-in-the-wall, but their Schillerlocken with summer berries is just to die for! If only it weren't so damned expensive because of the rationing. Now _there's_ a good reason to end this war.”

I shook my head at him. “So you can afford to perpetuate your habit? Do you even need food to function?”

“No, but I still get hungry. All the time. And it's hard to think straight when you're in constant pain, you know!”

I wanted to remind him that we had bigger problems than our groaning stomachs; but something in the way he whined and the fight went out of me. All I could do was sigh.

“You go on with your hunger strike if you like,” he went on. “Good luck with that. But I can only sacrifice so much of myself for this job, and my taste buds aren't going to be part of it. Ah! Speak of the devil, here we are.”

* * *

That night, the events of the day played themselves out for me, over and over again, so I could get no sleep.

Only now the woman waiting for her son to return had my mother's face.

I had not mentioned her to Tsuzuki. I spoke of my past life no more than he had spoken of his—which was to say, not at all. I was not yet ready to speak of it—was not sure then if I ever would be—and he must have known this. At least enough not to pry.  
But I thought of what he had said about the war, our inability to help. It brought a memory to the forefront I had forgotten was there. 

On my way to work the day my mother died, I had passed a group of boys destined for the front, saying their goodbyes to their families. They looked so young, hardly more than children. Certainly not old enough to carry a rifle, let alone know how to use it. 

I would be lying if I said I wasn't affected. An amorphous anxiety burrowed its way into me, gnawing at my gut, scratching away at the inside of my skull. I was tempted to beg off early that day, claiming illness. It would have been the truth, but not as I wanted my coworkers to believe. If I had followed my instincts, I might have been home before Mother could harm herself. I might have taken away the need, prevented the whole sad affair.

Now I could not stop thinking about those boys. 

The hymn they sang, which followed me on the air as I walked away, resurfaced that night to haunt me. How they smiled despite the fate they must have known awaited them. Despite the tears rolling down their own cheeks. It was all any of us could do. Just continue to believe we were on a true and righteous path—no matter the evidence to the contrary. No matter what happened, the sun still rose, the trees still blossomed in spring, and our glorious empire marched on.

We shinigami would keep marching on, impotent as the world went to hell around us. That was only the first night I wondered: what had I gotten myself into?

* * *

“I have a confession to make. I don't believe he's dead either.”

Over the bustle of the cafeteria where they had agreed to meet on her lunch break—a far cry from the posh Kyoto cafes and bistros he usually frequented—Ukyo blinked up at him.

“You really do love him,” she said. “Don't you?”

She had left her lab coat and all that went with it behind at the office, yet he could still feel the edge of her scalpel peeling the flaps of his veneer away, the keen scientist's eye behind the microscope trying to peer beneath his unreadable surface. That was the Ukyo he knew, never satisfied until she got her answer. 

Whatever her meaning in asking him such a question, however, it was irrelevant when he really thought it over. There was no longer any reason not to tell the truth.

“I care about him very much,” Oriya said with such honesty he actually felt refreshed by it. “Yes. I suppose I do love him.”

“Even after everything he's done?”

He had not spared her many details after the university fire. He owed her that much then, and he stood by that decision now. They had long since left high school. Saki was long dead. Protecting her now meant telling the truth. 

Even if it meant missing her smile a little more.

“Even after everything he's done.”

She sighed, adjusting the napkin in her lap.

“Then you're a better friend than I am, because I'm not sure how I feel. How am I supposed to reconcile caring for a man who's done such terrible things? I could lie to myself, say he's really not the monster he seems to be, but what good would that do?”

“He would never hurt you, Ukyo. You must know that.”

He only realized after the fact, at her sigh, that that wasn't what she had meant at all.

“I want to believe you're right,” Ukyo said. “But that doesn't change things. He still frightens me.”

“He frightens me, too.”

“And yet, you continue to chase after him.”

“Yes. Someone has to save him from himself.”

A fierce snap as she broke her cheap, wooden chopsticks apart. He watched her head tilt at a slight angle, and knew she was resisting an urge to look at him. To glare at him for throwing that back in her face now, after everything had changed. Though that had not been his intention.

“Do you even think that's an attainable goal?” She couldn't quite erase all hope from her voice. “I mean, assuming he's still out there somewhere. Assuming there _is_ something to save.”

And that was a big assumption. Absence of evidence, and whatnot.

“No,” Oriya said. He was, after all, being honest. “But I shan't let that keep me from trying.”

* * *

The first month and a half of our working together went smoothly enough. As smooth as matters concerning the living and the dead can be expected to go. 

I got used to the feeling of being undead. Dare I say I even appreciated the new resilience it lent me. Somehow it helped to put being an agent of Enma in perspective, this sense that I was untouchable—helped me maintain my professional cool when it came time to reap the souls of our cases. Tsuzuki even lauded my heartlessness, to a certain degree, though not in such blunt words—said he envied the apparent ease with which I was able to carry out my duties.

I'm not sure whether it would be truer to say it was all a front, my cool calm, or that at those moments my behavior was indeed honest and genuine. It was simply that I moved from one task to the next so eagerly, I never allowed my deeper feelings to catch up. I had convinced myself they were unnecessary, a distraction to carrying out my task. My responsibilities depended on a clear head: souls to take, reports to file, fuda to learn and the occasional vengeful spirit or minor kami to quell. Even if I had wanted a moment for myself, there was no time for it. And when my fears looked to be within sight, running up behind me, Tsuzuki—as if knowing it—would whisk me away to Kyoto, to watch the living go blithely about their business as though they were not surrounded by death on all sides. And, naturally, for a cup of tea and pastry.

And then.

August.

* * *

“What is this all about, then?”

Tsuzuki stared wide-eyed at the bodies filing into the Summons office. Most of them I had never seen before. I would soon learn that personnel had been called in from the other divisions—some of whom had worked briefly for Summons in the past, before being reassigned to departments more befitting their skills, or constitutions. But different divisions did not usually talk; it took an issue that absolutely could not be resolved except by coordination to make them play nice with one another. Even rarer that they should cooperate in person. “Not sure,” Tsuzuki answered me, but it was plain from his face he had some indication, some guess that was better than mine. “Looks like something's about to happen.”

That sounded ominous. “Any idea what?” 

“I don't know, but this is what it looked like around here right before the first big round of carpet bombing.”

Superstitious fear took whatever else Tsuzuki might have been about to say, and shut it tight behind his lips lest it come true. Nor could I exactly blame him. In just the past few months, the bombings had become simply the order of the day. No sector had been spared. Once the Ministry knew how to deal with the deaths resulting from them, they became an occurrence we in Summons heard about but never saw, and only rarely had to deal with in our capacity as shinigami. 

Even I, though I had only been with them a short time, already felt distanced from my mortal life, as if a thick wall of time had been erected between it and myself. I remembered the panic when the air raid sirens whined. I remembered the terror of not knowing when or whence the bombs would come, or whether it was you or your next-door neighbor who would survive the night.

But now it felt as though it had all happened to someone else. I knew how I had died, but the exact memory of it was still locked away from my conscious self, trapped inside a box in my mind I could not open. Leaving me with only . . . impressions, and vague, disembodied feelings.

So I could not blame Tsuzuki for leaving his partner's side and pushing through the gathered crowd to hear better. 

When the chief emerged from his office, hollow-eyed and followed by the equally grim-faced secretary of the War Division, we all fell silent, hanging on the edge of our nameless anxiety.

Nor did the chief bother with pleasantries. 

“We just received word from our counterparts in America. The government there plans to end this war quickly, and they're planning something big, something that is projected to cause unprecedented destruction. We are told to expect unusually high numbers of fatalities. Therefore, until further notice, all shinigami are hereby ordered to remain on stand-by so we can respond to this event as soon as it happens.”

“What kind of event are we talking?” said one of the Kansai agents.

“We do not know for sure.” It looked as though it particularly pained the chief to admit he did not have so critical an answer. “We were not given specific details. Either the American ministry's spies were not able to find out, or they are refusing to share that information with us.”

“Goddamned politics,” Morita growled from the back, voicing what the rest of us only thought.

The War Division secretary shifted in his solid pose, and we were all slightly more grateful for his aura of confidence when he took control of the briefing. “What we do know is that this attack will be like nothing we've seen before. You all remember when the fire bombings started? How it completely upset our system? Well, it seems the Allies just keep coming up with more and more inventive ways of killing people. We have been warned these deaths won't be like any we're used to prosecuting. We need all the bodies we can get in the field on this one, which means putting aside our interdepartmental differences. And it means we need _everyone_ in tip-top shape, focused, and ready to go when the call comes in.”

I couldn't help noticing he glanced at Tsuzuki when he said “everyone,” though it was so brief it would have been easy to miss if I hadn't been watching him. It seemed even outside our division he had developed some sort of reputation.

The War Division, it quickly became apparent, had a plan in place for just about every military action the living world could think of, even one as uncertain as that which we now faced. The department's secretary laid out a list of protocols that each of us was supposed to follow when the event occurred, from triage of the soon-to-be dead to the chain of command should we encounter any problems for which we had no answers. It was, after all, to be an unprecedented type of disaster.

I admired the secretary his preparedness, and found my anxiety at least momentarily assuaged by his talk of tactics and procedures. Whatever followed, I assured myself, I would have his plan to keep me from veering from my mission.

Tsuzuki's own train of thought could not have been further from mine. Immediately after the briefing, he chased down our chief and asked, “What about our case?”

“It's been suspended,” Saigen said. “Until this crisis is dealt with.” 

“But we're _so close_ to ending this thing.” We were currently looking into the case of a munitions factory that had already caused the untimely deaths of half a dozen adolescent girls by way of freak workplace accident. Based on the testimony of some of the survivors, we suspected a cursed object was to blame; and after a week of searching, we were finally homing in on the culprit. 

“If you pull us out now,” Tsuzuki said, “more girls could die. We have to get back out there, Chief!”

Saigen turned to me. “Tatsumi, would you tell your partner why this is so important?”

The fact that he wanted me, a relatively new recruit, to tell off a senior agent with eighteen years of experience over me should have been telling, if I weren't busy at the time being taken aback by his response. “Actually, Chief, I must agree with Tsuzuki on this one. Though I understand the urgency of this matter, I think the young women involved in our case would argue saving their lives from what is, in fact, a clear and present danger is a much more acute concern at the moment than these . . . nebulous threats. Allow us to continue our investigation, and when the attack does come, send a message our way and we will come immediately to your aid.”

I thought I had argued my case well. I even allowed myself a small, smug smile in my confidence. I was not prepared to see such disappointment settle in over Saigen's already somber features. 

“These orders come from higher up. But even if I did have the authority to overrule them, I wouldn't. I'm sorry, gentlemen, but your request is denied,” he told us, though it seemed he was speaking directly to me when he added: “I thought you of all people would show a little more sympathy in this situation.”

* * *

The waiting was difficult. Who knows how many souls went unclaimed or escaped their fate in the couple of days that the Summons Division sat dormant. Cases like mine and Tsuzuki's were lost in the mountains of paperwork that followed, nor did we have a moment to follow up on them for some time. By then, the world had already been irrevocably changed.

But nothing could be as difficult as what was to come.

I will spare you as much detail as I can, out of respect for the dead. Being of that same generation that came of age during wartime, I can understand why so many were reluctant to write about the events of those particularly dark days, even if only to preserve the memory for posterity. I understand the feeling that no words can touch the horror of reality. I can understand the shame beneath the horror, even though I was already dead: the inhuman indignities heaped upon us, and all the while a niggling sense of our failure, our humiliation, our loss. Our collective blame, for both ourselves and for our enemies who thought such action could ever be justified. Anger at our sacred leaders who could not protect us from this new threat from the skies, who debated how to keep the war machine going while untold numbers of their subjects lay dying. I like to think they were just as stunned as we were, but my sympathies don't seem to stretch far enough to encompass them.

We got our orders on what had promised to be a sunny August morning. In Hiroshima, the bomb had already fallen. The first casualties were starting to trickle in to Judgment, but rumor reached us that fatalities numbered in the tens of thousands. 

It was only the start. The final numbers would be staggering, spanning decades, but long-term ramifications were not our immediate concern. We shinigami were needed in Chijou to help with the retrieval effort. No soul had ever died in a nuclear explosion before. No shinigami had ever investigated such a death. We had to think on our feet. Each pair was assigned a section of the city. We were released on the ruined metropolis to do what we did best: find the doomed, and ease them on their way.

But when we arrived, it was a scene out of Hell. The city was on fire, what was left of it: buildings flattened or crumbling wherever you looked, trees stripped and uprooted and lamp posts bent to the ground. Rubble, everywhere. By then, a few hours had passed since the blast, and the once clear sky was now black with ash and . . . something else, something that tingled on the skin and at the back of one's throat. Made you feel as though no amount of water would ever alleviate your thirst again.

Though I was already dead, no sooner had I set foot in that damned city than a powerful terror seized me full in its grip and would not let me go. I froze to the spot as it all washed over me: images I could not control, a cacophony I could not banish. The lion's-roar of flames. A towering, raging inferno. The roofs of my neighborhood a living, breathing red monster, licking at a black sky as it slithered from one house to the next. The air so thick with smoke and ash each breath was a death sentence. I saw the kind old widow who lived in the house next to mine come stumbling out, her hair and arms on fire. I only recognized her by the pattern on her monpe trousers. We had all come out onto the street to assess the damage, put out the fires, but there was no stopping them. There were too many bombs, too much of a breeze that night, too much kindling for their fire. So we tried to flee, but there was no escape once we started to run. The heat bore down like an iron, pressing us down—pressing on our lungs, on the backs of our eyes, until all we could see was the red of our own blood. Choking, fighting for even the smallest of breaths so we hardly even noticed when clothes went up in flames, then flesh—

Tsuzuki shook me back to myself. And I was surprised to find I had no burns to be sore to his touch. I was still standing, whole, unburnt—an offering to the war that had long since already been made. My death was in the past and hundreds of miles away; my shinigami body, immaculate, even as the radioactive ash drifted down on to us. At that time, we had no idea what it was.

“Come on, Tatsumi,” Tsuzuki said. “We have to find survivors.”

He was right, of course. There were people out there depending on us. But “survivor” was, in our case, only a temporary designation.

* * *

We found them soon enough, tattered and singed, wandering about lost and bewildered. Their world had literally been shattered; they knew not where to go, what to do with themselves. Their purpose was gone; whereas we, we angels of death, had arrived only to fulfill ours.

Those were the more fortunate ones. There were others whose own skin hung off them like rags, or who had given in to their thirsts and drunk from the contaminated river, thereby sealing their fate. Theirs were the cases we would find ourselves drawn to in the makeshift camps that gathered, made makeshift morgues by the radioactivity. And, to a lesser degree, by us.

The kiseki was apparently unfamiliar with deaths like these. Radioactivity poisoning was a slow, agonizing, and uncertain way to die. It destroyed its victim from the inside out, a fast-moving cancer. We had no shortage of souls who were doomed by this sickness. We quickly learned to spot the ones who would not recover as we moved among them, as though we could _hear_ the degeneration of their cells, those who required our touch to spare them from further torment and send them on their way.

Tsuzuki was in his element there. One after another, he knelt at their sides, took their hands or touched cool fingers to their foreheads. He sat with them as they begged for water, family, relief—liberally giving false assurances that everything would be all right. Right before he took them.

I would not exactly call them lies, the words of comfort he gave the dying. The judgment they were going to—and whatever awaited them beyond—was surely better than this living tableau of hell on earth. They would be safe there, free of pain forever more. That was what his crimson eyes promised as they held each victim's so steadily, unabashedly: sanctuary, peace, away from this.

He never seemed more beautiful to me than he did then. Even marred by the blood of the dying where they had grabbed him in their desperation. It only enhanced the illusion. He was a bodhisattva, an angel, a Christ—perfect in his grace and compassion. How their pain must have weighed on his soul, yet he let not a bit of it slip past his patient smile, knowing they needed his strength, his resolve, more than anything in their final moments.

And there was I, unable to fulfill my obligations with my heart in my throat and ripples of my own death overlapping every sound that reached my ears, every biting scent, every vista set before me. While Tsuzuki took them all without hesitation into his arms—the women and children and old men, the immolated and maimed and the whole of body alike—I stood back, afraid to touch them. Afraid their sickness would rub off on me and I would join them, burning all over again. Afraid that this time the pain of death would not be a temporary one, but something more like what I deserved.

We moved through the camp like cranes combing a pond for frogs—stepping slowly, carefully, among the myriads, studying each terrified, blackened face for signs of the end. At one point, a low droning sound caught our ears. It took a moment to recognize it as words. Tsuzuki nodded toward the source. Your turn, his gesture seemed to say. 

His slight, sad smile did not feel judgmental, but it spurred me into action nonetheless. I had a responsibility here, it reminded me, and it was others beside myself who would suffer if I failed to fulfill it. I could not shirk my duties, or pass them off to Tsuzuki and the others forever. I had asked him once for a way to make a difference. Who was I to pick and choose now how that difference was made, when the governments at war never asked nor cared about the opinions of the dead?

I followed the voice to a pallet where a woman lay, her age impossible to tell: She sounded ancient, though it was no doubt the smoke that had burned her vocal chords raw. I could not see how she was still alive. Below the neck she was merely slick, blackened rags. At first I thought they were the remains of her clothes, before realizing with horror they might just as well have been her flesh. It was only the recognition of our shared humanity that overcame my aversion to the sight of her and the foul stench rising from her cot. Though even attempting to speak must have brought her pain the likes of which I could only imagine, she continued to chant the nembutsu.

Moved by something beyond my control—pity or the empathy of a fellow burned sacrifice, I know not which—I fell to my knees beside her. Still I dared not touch her. Doing so would surely have put her in agony, I reasoned. But did my fear of her and the other victims really need a reason?

“I'll pray with you,” I offered instead.

And she broke her stream of prayers long enough to attempt a smile for me. When she began again, I murmured the words along with her. I had never considered myself a Buddhist—or much of anything, for that matter—but I knew the words, and it was the very least I could offer a woman who would not make it through the night, let alone the hour.

After some time—it could not have been very long—she trailed off into a whisper, and at last altogether into silence, and was still. Against my fears, I reached out then and touched her forehead. “May you wake in the Pure Land,” I found myself saying over her, though the words rang hollow and stale to my ears. Too little, too late. I do not know what possessed me, other than a desire to bring some sense to what was at its core a senseless death. It certainly wasn't belief. I knew better now than I ever did in life: Death, and what comes after, is never as simple as the various religions would have it.

“You could have taken her earlier.”

I was not aware of how long Tsuzuki had been standing over me, watching me. I did know not to take offense at his words. They were not meant to reproach; merely to guide. Yet their timing made them sting, even if he had not intended it as such: “It's okay, you know. No one will reprimand you for it in a situation like this. This is . . . it's unprecedented, to say the least. It's not really killing. If you take them early, I mean. Just to stop the pain.”

“I'll keep that in mind,” I assured him with a hardened nod. It was better than admitting the truth: that I had the power in my hand to end that woman's suffering, and I had been too afraid to make the decision to use it.

* * *

“My apologies, Tsuzuki, for my behavior today. I suppose I should have warned you I was a coward.” 

It felt freeing to admit it by the light of the distant burning buildings, as if it were some insignificant thing told by a childhood campfire, to be sucked upward by the flames into that black, toxic sky and never heard again. Now that I was dead, I suppose it was rather insignificant. And I had always felt most at ease with my true self in the dark—in the dim corner of a bar, the office after hours, or in the quiet stillness of my room, the flicker of a kerosene lamp flame over a page my only source of light.

“You're not a coward, Tatsumi,” Tsuzuki insisted, ever the worst offender in any pissing match of self-pity. “You're handling this better than some of us, and we've been doing this a lot longer than you have.”

“It's not just this. I always shied away from conflict. I never fought in the war, never enlisted—”

“Neither did I,” Tsuzuki said. “Or the chief, or Morita or Takayanagi. Does that make us cowards?” He thought for a moment. “Although, to be fair, there weren't any wars going on when we were at the age to enlist.”

He was trying to make me feel better, though, and at the very least I appreciated the effort.

“I'm curious, Tatsumi. How did you avoid the draft? Er, if you don't mind my asking.”

“It's all right.” I found Tsuzuki's patient smile encouraging. As well as the suggestion of a different topic. A momentary respite from the death around us. “My little sister came up with the idea, actually. A classmate of hers had told her about a brother who received a deferment for his tuberculosis. She got this notion in her head that if she could get me to catch a chest cold, I could fool the doctors at the recruiting office into thinking _I_ had T.B.

“Well, it worked.” I couldn't help the slight tug of a smile at the memory. My sisters worrying over me, their confidence in their own genius. Their mortification when their efforts turned out better than they had expected. “I contracted a cold, and I had a nice, deep rattling cough just in time for my exam. The doctor took one listen to my lungs and told me I would never join the army. We were relieved—until my little cold developed into pneumonia. I was out of university for a month, nearly failed my classes.”

Tsuzuki laughed, taking a swig of whiskey from the flask he had been nursing for the past hour. I had a hunch Morita had passed him more than updates when our department met to compare notes that afternoon. Another of Tsuzuki's weaknesses about which I was then only beginning to learn. 

Plunking the flask down on the pavement by his feet—I had already declined his offer to share—he folded his arms on his knees and leaned over them. “Hard to imagine you lying like that, Tatsumi. You just don't seem like the type. To be any good at it, anyway.”

“Better than you think. But it wasn't hard to fake being sick when I was all but coughing up my lungs.”

I had hardly spared a thought for my sisters since waking in Meifu. Now those warm memories melted into concern. “I don't even know if they're still alive, my sisters.” Or if they even knew I was dead.

“Maybe when this is all over, you'll have to look them up,” Tsuzuki slurred. He seemed to have reached a more peaceful place in his drunkenness. I envied him that, after the day we had, though I had no desire to join him in it.

“You'd have to be careful, though. They shouldn't know about you. Have to maintain order in the universe, and all that.”

“Let them keep believing I'm dead?”

“You _are_ dead.”

“You know what I mean.” He sounded as though he were speaking from personal experience. “What did you do? It must have been, what, fifteen years ago that you passed? Twenty? You still have living relatives, Tsuzuki? Siblings?”

He groaned a negative. “All dead. Every last one.”

I figured by the tone of his answer we were done with that line of talk, so I said nothing.

After a while, a new thought struck Tsuzuki. Or perhaps simply a conciliatory mood.

“I had a sister, too,” he said, so quiet at first I thought I had imagined it. “Once upon a time. We have that in common at least. Right, Tatsumi?”

* * *

We never believed the Allies would drop a second bomb. Though the American reapers warned us it was coming, we doubted any civilized power could be that cruel, twice.

We certainly never expected it to fall on Nagasaki.

 _Our_ sector.

Considering the magnitude of the destruction, Tsuzuki kept it together rather well in Hiroshima. But there was something about seeing the city he visited day after day—that he had watched grow for eighteen years, come to embrace as a second hometown—reduced to rubble and fire and ash. 

I had only begun to appreciate the beauty that old trading city had to offer, yet I could hardly trust my eyes to believe the devastation. It was as though some new piece of me that had finally begun to thrive in its surroundings had been ripped out brutally by its roots. The factory where we had been working our last case was gone—entirely wiped from the earth, having been so close to the site of the blast. The girls working in it whom we might still have been able to help just days ago, all presumed dead. I could only imagine how Tsuzuki felt, knowing his guilt must have been at least as deep as mine. Knowing it was tearing him apart inside, the niggling thought that—somehow—if he'd defied our chief after all, or returned to the city a day earlier—if he had done any number of things he did not do—he could have saved them. He might have saved them all.

Somehow we found the strength to carry out our responsibilities. There were so many souls who needed our help, we lost track of each other. But when I saw him later, covered for the second time in only days in radioactive soot and blood, I knew—somehow I knew—that something inside him had broken. Somehow I knew I had lost him.

That was the beginning of the end. Of the war—thank god—but also of our partnership.

* * *

“How many more god-damned bombs is it gonna take before the emperor fucking surrenders, already?”

“Show some respect,” Shiromaru hissed at Takayanagi through her teeth. As a former girls' school teacher and socialist newspaper man respectively, it was no secret the two loathed each other. Tensions were high in our department regardless, as they were throughout Meifu and the living world, but for some of us that still did not warrant using blasphemous language.

“Why?” Takayanagi spat back, shaking his morning paper. “Because he's Heaven's representative on earth, or some such bullshit?” We cringed, even if some of us felt, deep down in a place we would never admit the existence of, that the criticism was well placed. “What's going to happen to me if I don't? I'm already dead! And there'll be a lot more to join our ranks if _his holy highness_ doesn't show this country some goddamn respect and do the right thing. You know these bombs aren't the end game, right? It's only a matter of time before the Allies invade the main islands. They'll hit Kyushu first, if they don't bomb us all to hell—”

“Takayanagi,” Morita warned, “ _shut up._ ”

“And of course we won't have enough troops to stop them when they come ashore, 'cause we already scattered them all over a dozen different islands in the Pacific. It'll be like fish in a barrel. But unlike Normandy, _we'll_ be the fish.”

Tsuzuki very quickly, very quietly stood up. There was little drama to his exit, though it still managed to turn most heads in the office. Everyone, it seemed, had been waiting for it. Everyone except myself.

“Nice. Real well done, Takayanagi,” Morita growled across the room, “you _ass!_ ”

“What? Am I not entitled to my opinion now?”

“Right. That's _all_ you were doing, voicing your opinion.”

“You might want to go after him,” Shiromaru murmured to me while the other two castigated one another across the room. Nodding my thanks, I piled my paperwork neatly at my desk. “Try the cherry trees,” she suggested.

She was not wrong. 

I found him by the little stream that trickled through the grove. The tension was evident in his frame: pensive, irritated, restless. When he turned at my approach, it was anger I saw in those crimson eyes. They flashed at me as accusingly as two stigmata. As though I were somehow to blame for his mood. And, who knows, perhaps in my inability to prevent it, I was.

Eager in my pitiful way to difuse the situation and regain my good-natured partner, I told him, “Forget what Takayanagi said. He was just baiting you to get a reaction. Or else he's an idiot, and not worth upsetting yourself over.”

“But he was right. Wasn't he? About the invasion? It makes sense. If this war doesn't end soon—”

The implosion came so suddenly, I was not prepared, nor did I know what to do. As if he were one of our bomb victims, I could not bring myself to reach out for him, only watch as he turned away from me to hide a sudden rush of emotion. It did not seem my place to do more.

“I can't keep doing this, Tatsumi.” He would not let me see his tears, but I could hear them, unshed, in the waver in his voice. “Is this what the world is coming to? Governments can just press a button and wipe out ten thousand people, just like that, and there's nothing you or I or any of us can do about it but clean up the mess they leave behind every goddamn time . . . ?”

I didn't know what I should say. That I felt the same way? Suddenly anything seemed trite.

“I can't keep doing this job if this is going to be the new business-as-usual. I just can't. If they drop one more of those things, Tatsumi, I—”

There it was. The break. The spasm of the shoulders. The hitch of breath that escaped his control.

“I'm not sure it's still worth it.”

“Doing this job?”

He rounded on me again. He did not bother to wipe his tears. “ _Any of it!_ If this is what the world is coming to, maybe they don't deserve our help after all. Maybe none of them deserve to live.”

I was stunned. Not so much by his words, which were only an echo of my own doubts, but that the carefree Tsuzuki Asato, well of infinite patience, had spoken them. And with such determination. “You can't mean that.”

“Can't I?”

“You're frustrated. I understand that. We all are. That's the only reason Takayanagi said what he did,” I tried. “You can't let what he said destroy your resolve.”

“But isn't he right? Is the 'order of the universe' even worth preserving if humanity chooses to blast itself into oblivion? And who are we to stop them, really, Tatsumi? What are we even doing here, if not fighting a losing battle! If life is worth so little to the living, I don't see how anything we do makes one damn little bit of difference. If that's the way we're all headed—”

He had been worrying his right wrist with the fingers of his left hand, and with those words—perhaps conscious he was doing it for the first time—he dropped them, tucking his right behind himself. Hoping I had not noticed the seemingly throw-away gesture. As I said, I had no reason to wonder about his past at that time, either alive or dead. But I did begin to wonder then—wonder what secrets were buried in his soul, what could possibly be so shameful that he would guard them even to the point of overcompensation.

Guilt? That must have been one reason. And it was one I could readily understand. I may have dreamed of the cold salvation of a razor blade once or twice, those seemingly endless nights the ghosts in my own life returned to haunt my restless mind. I may never have acted on those fantasies, my cowardice or sense of self-preservation being the stronger force, but it was still one thing we had in common: a romanticized opinion of self-destruction.

But when he muttered, perhaps more to himself than to me: “I'm not sure that's a world I want to live in,” I could only think of my mother.

And I wished Enma had never chosen me to be his partner.

* * *

Two days later, the emperor surrendered. Cases were momentarily forgotten as the entire office gathered around the radio to listen to the address. I tried to drown it out in work, but my fingers could only sit silently on the keys of my typewriter as if of their own respectful volition. Takayanagi and Shiromaru both cried silently at their desks at the sound of emperor's weak voice, his careful, high-toned diction. Theirs were not the only wet eyes in the office.

Tsuzuki's were among the few that stayed dry. The shame of defeat did not touch him as it did many of the others. He had already separated himself from that world, declared himself an alien to it, an antithesis. If his words before could be taken seriously, and not just as frustrated rantings, this could only mean that the world was not yet entirely irredeemable in his eyes.

I was relieved as well, if for a different reason. I had just learned that my sisters and their families had made it through the past two weeks alive and well. Now, I believed in my naivete, everything could return to normal.

I was mistaken.

We fought, Tsuzuki and I. Little disagreements at first, over petty things. But they wedged the gap the bombs had first cracked open between us ever wider, clearing the way for doubt, for resentment, for loathing. His more frequent fits of depression only further reminded me of my mother's selfish acts of destruction—and subsequently my own failures—and I held that against him. When I lost my patience, I made sure he knew it. Which was not to say he spared me my faults, either.

For one, I insisted on performing our summoning duties by the book.

I had thrown myself in my free time—of which I had much too much working the Kyushu sector—into the study of Meifu law and policy. Initially, when I had been thrown out into the field as Tsuzuki's partner, my ignorance of such matters and the chief's insistence on my deferral to Tsuzuki led me to believe that his way of conducting business was not only what was expected of me, it was correct.

I came to discover that not only had Tsuzuki been cutting corners for almost two decades while Saigen and the higher-ups turned a blind eye, his bad habits were getting worse. Granting last wishes; extending lives already pushed past their natural limits long enough for finishing unfinished business; pursuing criminals of whom there was no mention in the kiseki; taking justice in the living world into his own hands. In some cases even, becoming far more intimate with his cases than any responsible shinigami should ever have allowed himself to become. This was not mere sloppiness. It was a willful disregard for the rules—rules which had been written for the express purpose of maintaining order among the separate realms.

A part of me now suspects Tsuzuki may have been challenging Enma, if only on a subconscious level, to terminate whatever agreement had been arranged for him, and grant him a more permanent death. Then again, I may be giving him too much credit: His actions were not always driven by higher mental processes; he was prone even then to knee-jerk decision making, especially those dictated by his gut, and used to getting his way through manipulation, subtle or otherwise, with promises he never intended to keep.

But to Tsuzuki, my insistence on following the rules was received as an injustice toward the damned. A sign I had no human feelings, no concern or empathy for their fate. To be fair, I overreacted to his laxity with a zealousness that was not exactly sensitive to our cases' delicate situations. As Morita might have put it, I was a horse's ass. In this aspect, Tsuzuki was right to admonish me.

However, I was right to admonish his behavior as well. I may have been insensitive, but I got the job done; whereas he _played_ with life and death.

He reversed a young woman's fate. 

It must have been early September. The days were still warm and long, but the light was changing, the first hints of autumn in the air. And the first hints of change in the country. A funereal resignation sat over everything. Japan was occupied, young men returned from afield damaged, beaten, and the lack of proper rations brought the Judgment Bureau steady business.

She belonged to the latter category: a girl who had spent most of the last decade under house arrest for no other reason than the misfortune of being born to French immigrants. She had watched her parents wither and die of malnutrition and despair, suffered neglect and humiliation at the hands of her fellow countrymen, entrusted with her care; and now that Death had finally arrived to end her suffering and unite her with her family, Tsuzuki whisked her out from under its grasp, and resurrected her to a sort of half-life of loneliness and grief, in a native country that no longer wanted and could not support her. 

He did it because he pitied her, I know. That much was plain. She must have reminded him of someone, someone he would have traded his own life to save. Or perhaps had, and would all over again. Maybe in his mind he had even fallen for her, as he managed to convince himself he had fallen for so many of our cases before.

Whatever his reasons, what he did was so grossly, so obscenely against the rules I could not turn a blind eye to it, no matter how I may have sympathized with the girl. It was wrong to bring her back from a natural and appointed death. And I said as much when I reported him to Saigen, even going so far as to submit an official complaint to the Castle of Candles.

But their hands were tied. There was nothing they would do, short of giving Tsuzuki a slap on the wrist.

I was not as lenient. My sense of justice forced me to confront him. My mental list of his abuses had grown considerably in the weeks following Nagasaki, and I recalled them for him with brutal detail, heaping one atop another without rest. It felt as though a shadow had passed over me, darkening my mind, and I could no longer keep my feelings locked up behind a wall of tactful professionalism. 

I was cruel. I did not hold back. He had pushed me to the point my aversion to conflict was overruled by the emotions roiling within me. Once the torrent of accusations came spilling out, I could not stop them, nor separate the true from the exaggerated; all felt equally valid in my indignation. They shattered around him like the broken glass of so many of my parents' quarrels. 

He did manage to land a few blows of his own. Reminding me that he had been a shinigami almost two decades longer than myself—that he was one of the senior-ranked agents in our department, and I had no right to go behind his back, let alone presume to know better than he what was best for our cases. That I was a coward for not standing up to him myself. That he not only had more experience, he was more powerful than myself. He had ten loyal shikigami at his beck and call then, whereas I could barely manage to use more than a few weak fuda. I hid behind my words, he said, because I knew I had nothing else—no real weapons to fight him with, no defense. 

My defense, I said, was his victims' pain. He believed he was saving them, when in fact he was only delivering them toward further suffering. The girl he brought back from death—he might have thought he was giving her a priceless gift, but _she_ would live long enough to regret it. To resent it. He had made of her an abomination. An error that upset the very fabric of existence.

Apparently I chose the wrong word. He changed before my eyes from that eager, tail-wagging pup I had blindly followed to a growling, rabid cur. He said I had no idea what truly constituted an abomination. He said he could destroy me if he wished. He had done as much to stronger shinigami in the past, and it would be easy for him. I had no idea what he was truly capable of—how much damage he had done when I was just a naïve child trying to raise crickets. I should be _afraid_ of him.

And for a moment, I was.

Then fear turned to indifference, and a cool, calm darkness engulfed me where the roaring inferno of his anger could not reach. In its shade, I was numb to both the resentment and the admiration, the pity and worship and embarrassment, that until then I had harbored toward him. What could he do, I asked myself, that could possibly be worse than continuing our toxic partnership? I let cold, calculating reason take over, and it could find only one solution.

I had to get away from him.

* * *

The door slid back on its runners with a whispering _hush_ , and Oriya looked back, afraid she might wake at the sound of his escape.

But there was no change in Ukyo's sleeping form—no wrinkle of the brow or hitch of breath to indicate the noise had penetrated her deep sleep. The peaceful expression remained on her youthful face. And in the curve of her naked body beneath the quilt. Even now there was something pure about her person, something that seemed to defy the depth of her experience and the sharpness of her mind, as well as the darkness _he_ had planted there. Something in the ability of her smile to erase the shadows in Oriya's own heart like the sun emerging from behind a cloud.

Yet those qualities—innocence and experience, purity and intelligence—seemingly exclusive, managed to coexist just fine in her petite frame, her wide and honest eyes.

As his gaze lingered, Oriya supposed he should feel guilty.

And not entirely for catching her so unguarded.

* * *

After all, he supposed, he had broken an unspoken pact between them, coming here. Rather than allowing her to come to him at his residence in Kyoto at her own leisure, and of her own initiative. He had invaded her space without leaving her much choice in the matter but to tolerate his company, and on top of it all under the guise of pursuing _him_. Once again, he had laid that burden from the past on her doorstep. Like some ignorant dog, bringing her some bone he found in the garden, wagging his tail proudly and unaware of how it had come to be there to begin with.

Which, of course, brought to mind that other unspoken pact—

But that they had broken long ago, even before Muraki's disappearance. Fully aware of what they were doing, and coming to a mutual realization that it really did not matter to either one of them what came of it. Making excuses for themselves, perhaps, that there was nothing else they could do in their situation, both suffering in their longing for a love that could never be consummated, even if the nature of that love was slightly different for each of them.

The object of it was the same, and that seemed to be enough.

Oriya tread silently with clothes in hand to the living room, and dressed there. It took only moments to pack his bag. He had never really unpacked it, not knowing how long he intended to stay. Or how long it would take her to kick him out.

In the end, it was the feeling that he was welcome that made him leave. It seemed to spur in him a guilt that if he chose to stay, he would pollute this little green sanctuary that Ukyo had managed to carve out for herself in suburban Tokyo. If not through any fault in his own character, then merely by darkening her doorstep with that specter of their past once again.

As though there were no traces of Muraki here. They were everywhere: in the garden; in a picture in the family shrine; in the arrangement of roses in the center of the dining room table. But none of these were leaping-off points. They were not clues to the next way station. They were cul-de-sacs. Dead ends. If he wanted pointers, markers that told him he was on the right path, he would have to look elsewhere.

Or risk losing himself in the past.

Not that he wasn't tempted.

* * *

He slipped on his shoes and quietly opened and closed the front door. It made a small creak on its hinges that could not be helped. Ukyo was usually a light sleeper. But he doubted she would try to intercept him, make him stay. One look at him and she would understand his urgency. She would have to. They were too much alike in that respect—too understanding of their mutual affliction to impede one another in their search for a cure.

 _Let me know_ is all she would say to him if she were standing there on the doorstep, shivering in the January air and watching him go. Or something to that effect: _I want to know. One way or another._

_If you find him._

He started to reach for his pipe. An automatic, defensive response. He had to remind himself it was not here. And even though the cigarettes were, they were a poor substitution for what he really craved.


End file.
